On The Gospel Of Mark

I attend a Thursday Night Bible Study at my church. Recently, we finished a study of the Gospel of Mark. I thought I would highlight this little read gospel. This gospel is often overlooked and is the earliest gospel. It’s terse, succinct, direct style differs from Mathew and Luke who seems to have used this gospel to structure their own accounts of our Lord Jesus Christ. Unlike, the Gospels Matthew and Luke, the Gospel of Mark doesn’t have anything like the Sermon on the Mount or as many parables, but there are things in it that the other two synoptic gospels don’t have such as the cursing of the fig tree. Someone has said that the writer of the Gospel of Mark could have written a Hollywood thriller since his gospel gets going fast and doesn’t let until its dramatic ending.

Our walk-through of this gospel was meaningful and insightful to me on many levels. As with all the studies we have done, it challenged me while confirming and reaffirming my faith in the gospel of Grace.

We used Griggs and Myers’ Mark’s Gospel From Scratch The New Testament For Beginners study guide. A concise and direct study guide and commentary and helpful to delve deeply into this gospel, I also used Timothy Keller’s full-length commentary Kings Cross and Mark Galli’s small devotional Jesus mean and wild: the unexpected love of an untamable God to help me understand this gospel better, what it means to follow Our Lord and Savior.

From its beginning line, “The beginning of the good news about Jesus the Messiah, the Son of God” to Jesus calling the apostles in 1:17, “Come, follow me, and I will send you out to fish for people.” To the healing of the man with leprosy in Mark 1:40-45 to the Pharisees questioning Jesus about fasting in 2:18-22 to the Parable of the Sower in Mark 4, the healing of a demon-possessed man in Mark 5. Jesus walking on the water in the sixth chapter, feeding the four thousand in the eighth chapter, Bartimaeus receiving his sight in the tenth chapter, giving the Great Commandment in the twelfth chapter, and Jesus’ arrest, trail, death, and resurrection at the end of the gospel Jesus’ power, love, mercy, and wisdom is fully demonstrated.

In this gospel, you see Jesus doing things and going to places immediately. Mark uses the phrase “and immediately” as an abrupt transition from one event and another. Of the twenty-seven occurrences of the phrase, twenty of them appear in the first half of the gospel. This is just one of the interesting things I learned in reading and studying this gospel in our group. Taking 14 weeks to read this short gospel helped to delve deeply into the story, structure, teachings, and meaning of this short gospel.